In the Company of Demons: Unnatural Beings, Love, and Identity in the Italian Renaissance (review)

Armando Maggi's In the Company of Demons comprises a study of four early modern works that together shed light on a complicated question: what did early modern thinkers mean when they referred to demons? Maggi analyzes the following texts in depth: the Strix of Gian Francesco Pico della Mirandola (1469–1533); Strozzi Cicogna's 1605 Il palagio de gl'incanti et delle gran meraviglie de gli spiriti e di tutta la natura loro; Pompeo della Barba's Spositione d'un sonetto platonico of 1549; and the De demonialitate of Lodovico Maria Sinistrari (1622–1701), which was not printed until 1875. Maggi's precise analysis of these texts yields interesting conclusions, one of the most powerful of which is the notion that for many Renaissance thinkers, spiritual bodies are similes; they are like earthly bodies, even if they are not precisely made of the stuff of which earthy bodies are made. When spiritual beings do what they do to coalesce, say, air into a recognizable bodily form, there is a purpose: to inform us of something, perhaps to warn us, even to harm us. Spirits, in other words, have intentions.

Another way to put this, of course, is that certain people in early modern Europe believed that spirits had intentions until, around the beginning of the eighteenth century, they (especially intellectuals) stopped believing in spirits at all. Yet Maggi's basic assumption is that "unlike our contemporary culture, that of the Renaissance tended to believe in an ongoing interaction between spiritual beings and humankind" (p. viii). Later in the book, Maggi writes: "I have tried to recuperate the spiritual, cultural, and philosophical elements of the dialogue and interaction between humans and spirits as they were detailed primarily during the Italian Renaissance. My readings have an intentional pre-modern flavor, as if to resist a modern rhetoric and mindset" (p. 139). In one sense this approach is thoroughly admirable: to understand a premodern text, one must also understand the assumptions that its writers and readers would have brought to that text. This nuanced understanding on Maggi's part represents what is best about this valuable book: Maggi's readings offer real and important insights into a specific premodern mindset. Within this mindset there reigned an unarticulated assumption, across various class and educational lines, that spiritual beings existed and that they could intervene in the phenomenological world. Maggi is certainly right to argue that there is something noteworthy about a culture, or set of cultures, in which even the most skeptical, well-educated members took as a given the existence of airy beings intermediate between humanity and divinity.

Still, refusing to interrogate these early modern assumptions can at times cause one to miss certain factors that might help us discern change over time. At the very outset of the book, for example, Maggi offers observations from Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini, intended to show that even these hard-nosed thinkers assumed the existence of spiritual beings. Here is Guicciardini, in Maggi's translation: "I am entitled to state that the spirits do exist. I mean those things we call spirits, that is, the aerial beings that speak with human beings in a direct and open way. My personal experience has convinced me of their existence" (p. viii). Its source is Guicciardini's Ricordi, his beloved set of short reflections and maxims on topics ranging from government to personal conduct, the politics of reputation to medicine. The maxim in question, number 211, goes on, in a passage that Maggi does not cite: "But what the spirits are, and of what sort they are, is known as little to the person who believes he understands them as it is to someone who hasn't even given a thought to the matter. This and predicting the future, as you see people sometimes do either by design or by means of a frenzy [furore], are hidden...